Mushkin Redline Ascent 3x2GB PC3-12800 C6 Memory Review

Benchmark Methodology

With an XMP profile alive and kicking, we will have no problem running this kit at the same settings anyone else will be able to with a motherboard that works with the XMP profile. This will give us a truly "stock" set of numbers for a very typical setup that consists of an i7 920 processor and single GTX 260 video card all at stock settings. As far as build budgets go, this memory fits right into that type of build and should be a fairly useful set of numbers for people to compare with. These stock results will appear in blue in our result graphs. The other three results will be a mixture of our stable overclocks with this memory, with one particular comparison being the focus.

The grey set of results are going to be our overclocked setup at the rated timings of 6-7-6-18 and rated voltage of 1.65v. The best part of this overclock is that with the CPU multiplier at 21X, we get a CPU frequency of 3645MHz. This is good because our overclocked setup at 6-8-6-20 which reached that impressive 963MHz (DDR3-1926) can run almost the same CPU frequency with a 19X CPU multiplier. These results will be the first red bars in the charts. This is going to give us a chance to directly compare the benefit of running DDR3-1736 at 6-7-6 to DDR3-1926 at 6-8-6. We have obviously never done this comparison before so we are excited to see the results.

The second set of red results will simply be our highest overclock of DDR3-2000 at 8-9-8-24. We will drop the CPU multiplier to 18X so we will have the CPU running at 3600MHz. Again, we are simply trying to get some interesting comparisons between the various memory overclocks we were able to achieve at similar CPU clocks. Here is a rundown of how we setup the OS for each set of results to provide an even playing field.

1. Windows Vista x64 w/SP1 is installed using a full format
2. Intel Chipset drivers and accessory hardware drivers (audio, network, GPU) are installed followed by a defragment and a reboot
3. At time of benchmarks the latest drivers were downloaded from their official web sites as the latest drivers, most notable, NVIDIA GeForce Release 185.85 WHQL
4. Programs and games are then installed followed by another defragment
5. Windows updates are then completed installing all available updates followed by a defragment
6. Benchmarks are each ran three times after a clean reboot for every iteration of the benchmark unless otherwise stated, the results are then averaged